


can opener needed; lost in time

by anotherbuskitten



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Friendship, Gen, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-03
Updated: 2014-08-03
Packaged: 2018-02-11 15:50:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2074020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anotherbuskitten/pseuds/anotherbuskitten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James has three knives, a pen, a box full of wooden animals and another stuffed with scraps of paper in tin cans.</p><p> </p><p>//or the Winter Soldier relearns New York, heroism and himself//</p>
            </blockquote>





	can opener needed; lost in time

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not American and I know nothing about New York. I'm going for generic city here.

He sells his first knife in a pawn shop; it is beautifully crafted and he holds out until they have given him $200 for it. He grins his thanks; sharp and dangerous and they shoe him out of the shop with worried glances.

Once out he worries his lip and immediately considers going and buying it back. He has sixteen knives left.

/

He buys a marker pen and twelve tins of beans. There is a lot of money left over.

He drops it in the pockets of a passing student.

/

When the beans run out he finds roadkill and stray animals to eat instead. One day he sees a missing pet poster and heaves his latest meal over the sidewalk. He finds his hunting knife and hurls it into the Hudson.

/

He writes the things he remembers on scraps of paper found in bins and stores them in the empty tin cans.

Each can is for different things. There is Steve, Natalia, Bucky, missions, the war, home and family.

He hopes he will need the other five someday.

/

Steve

  * _He draws._

  * _He’s small._

  * _He fights too much._

  * _He’s ill._

  * _His mom made fruit pies._




(he wonders if Steve’s friends remember to check his breathing)

/

Natalia

  * _She fights the best._

  * _It takes her a while to learn languages._

  * _She likes the rain._

  * _He loved her._

  * _She loved him back._




/

Bucky

  * _He was a person._

  * _He had two arms._

  * _He loved Steve._




(he isn’t Bucky)

/

Missions

  * _He is dangerous._

  * _He is a weapon._

  * _He is not supposed to remember._

  * _There is so much blood._

  * _He killed these people._

  * _He killed someone who looked like the girl who gives out pamphlets nearby._

  * _There is so much blood._




/

The War

  * _He didn’t want to fight._

  * _Steve shouldn’t be there._

  * _One of his masters had been there. The one who made him. No that came later – no – no_




/

Home

  * _The heating doesn’t work._

  * _Steve’s asthma plays up when he smokes._

  * _He can’t see the sky from the fire escape._

  * _They are behind on rent._




(he can’t remember if they cancelled the lease or not)

/

Family

  * _He had parents once._

  * _He had a sister._

  * _She liked skipping games but played jacks with him._




(the sky blurs when he tries to picture her face)

/

He gets mugged and breaks his assailant’s neck without thinking. There are no fingerprints for the authorities to find so he drags him to base of a broken fire escape and drops a bottle of something next to him.

He throws out another knife and hopes the man had no family.

/

He has twelve knives left. He doesn’t remember losing the last two.

/

He watches the avengers fighting on the display of an electronics store and traces the shield onto a paving slab from a puddle.

/

_Steve’s mother had been Irish._

_His sister had been called Rebecca._

_Natalia liked Greek poetry._

/

His last master had told him this was his last mission so maybe it would be alright if he put himself down?

He is useless without a mission, after all.

When he tries his nerve fails him and he thinks he will let it happen slowly instead. The knife that failed him is left behind. Can weapons die?

/

_Bucky had liked the fighting more than he should have done._

/

He uses another knife to separate metal from flesh and pulls off the arm his masters had been so proud of. It hurts more than he’d expected; he had thought he had forgotten pain.

The stub and ripped flesh of his back bled for ages until he thought he could drown if he just lowered his head.

He doesn’t know what to do with the arm so he leaves it there in the blood, in an alley behind a Laundromat. He thinks he will miss the whirr of machinery.

/

_He has been to America before. He had a mission here. He might have had more than one._

_Bucky preferred knives too._

/

His new home is near to Avengers Tower; where Steve lives. There are always people nearby, hoping to catch a glimpse of the heroes. Always photographers snapping at the doors and windows, hoping for a lucky shot.

He stays away from the people though so it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t ever see any of the residents of the tower anyway.

He stands outside a tourist shop and watches. The woman at the counter brings him coffee and waves off his attempts at payment. He tells her he is vet, hoping to see Captain America who proves soldiers can live. It’s only a sort-of lie.

She asks his name and he blanks. Later he is inside the shop wrapped in a blanket. The woman says he blacked out.

Steve had called him Bucky but he doesn’t feel like a Bucky; not the Bucky he read about at the exhibit anyway.

The woman’s name is Laura Hamilton. She makes him soup to take home (he doesn’t tell her home doesn’t exist) and frowns when she sees his knives but doesn’t say anything.

Her brother is fighting in Iraq, sometimes she looks at him like she wants him to tell her it isn’t as bad as it seems. Sometimes she looks at the empty space where his arm should be and he can see her worried look without looking. He thinks someone might have looked at him like that once.

Her brother’s name is Mark.

He thinks that names are wonderful, precious and elusive things.

/

These are the names he knows:

_Steve_

_Bucky_

_Rebecca_

_Natalia_

_Sarah_

_Laura_

_Mark_

_James_

(he thinks James is his)

/

He tries being James out on Laura one day: she says it suits him and ruffles his hair. It is a nice feeling; to have someone not be afraid of him.

Later she gives him a little badge with ‘James’ written on it in jaunty letters and directs him to the till while she gets an order in.

He likes it when Laura has orders to get in because he likes that she trusts him enough to leave him alone with her shop and customers. He thinks she shouldn’t but enjoys the feeling anyway.

Sometimes he tries to make her things as a thank-you but he finds the simple tasks harder than they are made out to be. He can’t cook and even if he could the shine of the kitchen is disturbing, he can’t draw and whenever he tries he is overcome with images of Steve.

He tries to write a letter but discards it when he discovers she cannot read Russian. He doesn’t remember how to write in English.

He has a whittling knife but the only pieces of wood available to him are stray sticks and broken doorframes from skips. He has a scratchy lion built but abandons it after a leg falls away.

His failure (mission failed. target remains alive. wipe him and start over) sickens him and he sits in his bush drinking cold leek soup and building a broken zoo of animals.

He thinks, sometimes, that being James is more trouble than it’s worth.

/

Somedays he feels like a proper person and wears his badge so he doesn’t forget again. Most days, though he feels like a carefully labelled specimen and hides in the bushes until the memories go away.

He paints his animals now; he has a whole collection in a shoebox, his tins are also stored in a box and his knives (of which he now only has seven) stashed around his body.

When he is in a bad mood he paints the animals in flag colours and tries to recreate Bucky’s missions with only one character.

When he does this Steve usually dies. It doesn’t help.

/

_His mother had had brown eyes._

/

Mark is declared MIA. James remembers that that happened to him – to Bucky – and Steve had rescued everyone. He pushes the thoughts down and slowly closes the shop, makes coffee and carries Laura over to her sofa.

The coffee steam wets her face when she holds the mug close. She hasn’t cried since receiving the letter. He doesn’t know what to do.

They stay like that; she curled feebly on the sofa and he at her feet until she falls asleep.

James stands up and walks over to the window. He counts his heartbeat and thinks about the war.

The war he remembers is different to this one.

He thinks, though, that he might have known Iraq as well.

/

/

Carefully, James puts all his little animals into their box which he places above the box holding his memories. Next to them he puts the whittling knife and a cheap plastic box of paints. Then, still carefully, he writes out in imprecise English,

_“I will come back. Do not worry. Take care.”_

He puts the animals on the coffee table with the knife, paints and note and shuts the door behind him.

/

On the second box he writes,

“Steve. I remember these. I am ~~safe to be around~~ not an Asset anymore. Please do not look for me.

 ~~James~~ ~~Bucky~~ ~~Winte~~ JBB.”

/

He doesn’t like computers _(he thinks Bucky did)_ but they work and they aren’t complicated. There are a lot of Mark Hamilton’s.

Still. Things are simpler now he has a mission.

**Author's Note:**

> yeah, fuck if I know but it seems to stay in vague sense when I reread it so it's going up


End file.
